10 Reasons Not to Vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson

Just a few days before a presidential election that could either be historic or terrifying, the gap between Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is scarily narrow: Clinton leads in national polls by just 3 percent, and neither Clinton nor Trump has support from a majority of voters. The reason: undecided voters, and voters who say they support third-party candidates.

Like it or not, voting is zero-sum game: There are a certain number of votes cast, and if you vote for one person, you are taking a vote away from someone else. Three percent of likely voters just don't know who they support yet. And 9 percent say they're planning to vote third party, with 4 percent of total voters backing Green candidate Jill Stein and 5 percent behind Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. While there aren't many of them, these third-party voters could very well swing the election. "The system is broken," these voters seem to say, "So I am going to vote my conscience." Voting one's conscience is a compelling idea. But here's why voting third party in this particular election is not particularly conscientious.

1. This is not a question of the "lesser of two evils." Voters dislike both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and that has many of them flirting with voting third-party. A lot of these voters are Millennials—and specifically Millennial women. In a two-way race between Trump and Clinton, polling shows Clinton winning young people, but that lead narrows when you offer the possibility of voting for Stein or Johnson. In other words, to many young people, Clinton seems to be the lesser of two evils—and given the option, they'll vote for a candidate they feel is more pure.

This is a terrible strategy and belies real sexism, even among those of us who grew up in a more feminist world. Clinton and Trump are not equals. Yes, she is the "establishment" candidate, by virtue of being a very successful and effective politician—not exactly a failing. She has laid out thoughtful, realistic, truly progressive policies, while Trump has peddled misogyny and white supremacy (and indeed, after Trump encouraged his supporters to patrol polling places in "certain areas," self-identified white supremacists are already planning to intimidate black voters). She's perceived as dishonest, but in reality, she tells the truth most of the time, while Trump lies more often than not. What seems to be happening is that Clinton, an ambitious and successful woman, just rubs people the wrong way—the way many people seem to just generally dislike ambitious and successful women. Clinton doesn't have to be your friend, but either she or Trump is going to be your president. And sending a message by voting third party actually sends the message that you don't care who wins.

2. Both Johnson and Stein are embarrassingly clueless about the basics of being president. There was the first Aleppo moment, when Johnson was presented with a question about the ongoing crisis in Syria and he asked, "What is Aleppo?" Then there was second "Aleppo moment," when Johnson was unable to name a single foreign leader he admired—because he couldn't think of the names of any foreign leaders, including the president of Mexico. As our nation's chief executive and commander in chief of our armed forces, a president needs to know a little bit about the world. Sure, he can surround himself with smarter people, but the buck stops with him. Do we really want that kind of final decision-making ability in the hands of someone who knows nothing about one of the globe's most significant and challenging conflicts, and can't even name the president of the country next door?

Stein may be able to name-check more foreign leaders than Johnson, but that doesn't mean she's much better on foreign affairs. One thing Stein is sure about is that she likes Russia and wants to prioritize smoothing out our relationship with the Russian government. That sounds fine in theory, until you consider that Russian president Vladimir Putin is a murderous strongman whose regime has a long record of human rights abuses. Stein even goes so far as to question whether the Russian-armed rebels shot down a Malaysian Airlines plane over Ukraine, claiming, "It's not at all clear yet," when, in fact, a report from independent investigators confirm that it's quite clear: Russia armed the Ukrainian rebels who shot down the plane, killing 298 people. Stein also denies that Russia is interfering with the U.S. elections, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Promoting diplomacy is one thing; getting chummy with an undemocratic and dangerous regime that has shown itself committed to undermining American democracy is quite another. Stein has crossed that line (along with Trump), and that in and of itself should be disqualifying.

3. Johnson would be trouble for reproductive rights, and Stein doesn't seem to care. On abortion rights, Johnson wants to have it both ways: Visit his website and an ad encourages viewers to "Sign to Support Life AND a Woman's Right to Choose." Johnson's website says he's personally pro-life but politically pro-choice–that "[h]e feels that each woman must be allowed to make decisions about her own health and well-being and that the government should not be in the business of second guessing these difficult decisions." But his site also touts the fact that "[a]s Governor, he supported efforts to ban late-term abortions"—so he apparently thinks the government should have some role in second-guessing difficult decisions, especially given that late-term abortions are rare and often occur when a pregnancy has gone tragically wrong. He's also said he supports laws requiring parental consent for a young woman to end a pregnancy. He opposes Obamacare requirements that insurance companies cover the cost of contraception. And while he supports abortion rights because Roe v. Wade is the law of the land, what he actually thinks is that the legality of abortion should be left up to the states—which would result in abortion being outlawed in much of the country.

Stein is strongly pro-choice, but reproductive rights don't really factor into her priorities: They show up nowhere on the issues page of her website. While she vaguely promises to "expand women's rights," Stein makes no specific commitments on abortion access, contraception, or even paid parental leave. There's no doubt that she supports all three, but it's telling that on a site where she explicitly mentions legalizing marijuana, abolishing corporate personhood, ending high-stakes testing in schools, and opening the presidential debates to more candidates, she couldn't find room to talk about some of the most fundamental women's rights issues.

4. Johnson's views on climate change threaten the survival of the world. Gary Johnson doesn't really care that massive environmental changes are going to quickly make large portions of the globe unlivable, driving death, instability, and conflict, because the sun will eventually destroy the earth anyway. Taking what he calls a "long-term view" on climate change, Johnson, in a 2011 talk, said, "In billions of years, the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the earth, right? So global warming is in our future." He thinks the government should just stay out of it. Millennials: If you want an earth for yourself and your children to live on, you should not be voting for Gary Johnson.

5. Stein has shown herself to be gutless. For all of Stein's self-aggrandizing—she bills herself as a braver, more honest representative of the American left than any Democrat—she's remarkably cowardly when it comes to standing up for her values when the going gets tough. Take, for example, her relationship with Putin. As Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast points out, Stein actually brags on her website about how much Putin liked what she said on a panel organized by RT, the Russian propaganda television network. And when she met with Putin, she didn't bother to bring up the horrific human rights abuses he oversees, including killing journalists and jailing LGBT people. Russian Green Party members criticized her visit for that exact reason. And if Stein can't stand up to Putin and advocate for human rights when she's purely an activist without the constraints of an elected official, how is she going to do it as president?

6. Johnson thinks there should be no restrictions on guns and no federal minimum wage. That's right, no minimum wage at all—Johnson thinks employers should be able to pay workers whatever they want, which is a pretty efficient way to conduct a race to the bottom. If young people and blue-collar workers are worried about under-employment, stagnant wages, and hard-to-pay student loans now, imagine what would happen if there were no minimum pay standards at all. And that's not the only issue on which Johnson is far outside of the mainstream: He also thinks there should be no restrictions on guns. At all. He's willing to "be open to a discussion on keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill," but has no idea what that discussion would even entail (itself a red flag for someone running for president).

7. Maybe you should have some experience in order to be president. The anti-establishment rhetoric that seeped into both the Democratic and Republican primaries has continued in the general election as well, and the argument seems to be that establishment politicians are inherently corrupt and ineffective. This is a bizarre argument: In what other job would you want to hire someone with little to no experience? Why in the world would you want someone with little to no experience taking one of the most difficult and important jobs in the entire world? Johnson at least has more experience than Stein—he's been governor of a state. But Stein's political career has mostly involved losing elections. She's lost elections for governor (twice), Massachusetts House of Representatives, Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth, and president of the United States. So she is something of a career politician, just a very, very bad one (to be fair, she has won one election: representative to the town meeting of Lexington, Massachusetts). What she clearly enjoys, though, is being a disruptive force, even though voters don't seem to actually want her in office. But that doesn't show the kind of adult judgment necessary to run the country.

8. A third-party candidate cannot win. But supporting a third-party candidate could skew the election. We've heard this song before: A two-party system is broken, so I'm voting third party. Last time around, it resulted in Ralph Nader voters pulling support from Democrat Al Gore, resulting in a tight race in Florida that the Supreme Court was then able to hand to George W. Bush. Think of how different things would have been if those voters had supported Gore instead: No Iraq War, which almost surely means no ISIS; probably no Great Recession. And George W. Bush was no Donald Trump. While there were plenty of reasons to disagree with Bush, at no point did he exhibit the kind of spectacular lack of impulse control Trump puts forward every day. Liberals worried Bush would push a conservative agenda, and he did; we didn't worry, though, that he would threaten America's very existence. Clinton has a narrow lead, and Stein, who is to Clinton's left, is almost surely pulling many more voters from Clinton than Trump—Stein voters, then, could hand Clinton a decisive win. And while most voters who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary are backing Clinton in the general, many aren't—and they're backing Stein or Johnson, not Trump (that many Sanders voters are backing Johnson, Sanders's ideological opposite, also suggests that perhaps the hostility to Clinton is in fact more about gender than political view). That means that these voters, by "voting their conscience," could elect Trump.

9. This isn't about who you like. It's about what kind of country you want to live in. Presidents aren't your friends. They aren't your parents or your therapist or your beer buddy. As Oprah Winfrey said of Clinton, "she's not coming over to your house." And so the question of this election isn't, "Who do I like better?" or even, "Who do I agree with more?" but, "How can I cast my vote to make America a better place?" A vote for a third-party candidate doesn't do that—it simply removes a vote from one of the two candidates who could actually win. The reality of politics is that if you want to get things done, you have to compromise, and that means any accomplished and effective politician is imperfect. Ideological purity feels good, but in the real world, casting those who share many of your values as indistinguishable from, or even worse than, your enemies (as Stein does) or being unable to lay out the nuances of your positions (as Johnson is) doesn't mean a departure from politics as usual; it means you don't get anything done. And since neither Stein nor Johnson can possibly win this election, voting for them is at best a vote for nothing and at worst a vote for Donald Trump.

10. Voting Stein or Johnson instead of Clinton imperils the nation. It is not an exaggeration to say that Donald Trump threatens American democracy and the country as we know it. He's already engaging in the kind of threats against his opponent you usually hear from dictators in unstable autocracies. He's undermining Americans' faith in our most fundamental institutions, suggesting that our voting processes—the foundation of our democracy—are rigged. In the meantime, foreign agents, probably from Russia, may in fact be doing their best to sow this kind of skepticism. This is highly unusual and very frightening. Whatever you think of Hillary Clinton—that she's dishonest, that she's craven, that she's wrong on the issues, that she just bugs you—she's not going to subvert American democracy or jail reporters or bar immigrants based on their religion. You might think she's wrong, but there's little question that the republic will still be standing after she leaves office. That we can't say that about Trump should be reason enough not to vote for him—and not to cast the kind of third-party vote that could usher him (and the apocalypse) into office.

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